I hear the call.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (heretofore known as MW2) was released and showed up at my doorstep yesterday. I played some single player last night, and immediately remembered that Call of Duty's single player doesn't do a whole lot for me...

It's big, it's flashy, it's pretty. It's a big, dumb roller coaster, but it's just not that fun.

Call of Duty has always been known for it's cinematic, action packed campaign. But that comes at a huge cost: it's rigorously scripted, catastrophically narrow and totally one dimensional.

It's like watching a bombastic play at the theater, but every once in a while the curtain falls down and reveals the fake, rigid machine that's controlling it all.

Sure, technically that's all games. But I much prefer the sandbox approach of the single player of Halo ODST or Farcry 2. Or Battlefield: Bad Company. Or Operation Flashpoint. Or even Borderlands.

I want options. I want to choose how I'm going to attack a situation. Don't stick me in a corridor, no matter how fancily dressed, give me the choice of a machine gun or a slightly different machine gun and say "shoot these pop-up targets until you win!"

The real ugliness is when I die (which I do somewhat often, just because I get confused by the shouting, explosions, debris and blood spattered on my screen) and I have to replay a section of a level. All I can see is how everything happens in the EXACT same way. Terrorist A will pop out of the window to the right, Terrorist B will spring up on the rooftop with a rocket launcher. Terrorist C, D and E are will come around the corner and unload. I'm not even sure there's AI involved, you can just run past them and they pretty much forget about you...

So I didn't play much before returning to Dragon Age. I'm being overly harsh, and I it's not terrible. But I can only take so much in one sitting.

Today, however, Jesse, Adam G, Ryan, Chris C and I all happened to come online at the same time, so we did a big multiplayer game together. We rolled deep enough to basically make up an entire team.

And then I remembered why Call of Duty is the shit. Then i remembered when I bought it Day One.

It was a blast. DESPITE how over powered I felt, since I haven't been playing much Call of Duty over the past year, like most people still have. DESPITE the fact that party chat is disabled in most multiplayer gametypes (I still call total bullshit on that. That is totally heinous. I'm not there to cheat, I'm there to have fun with my friends and avoid the jerks). Luckily I'm fast on the 'mute'.